Mounting a FAT32 Partition

So here we're talking about dual-boot situation where you have a system which boots to a 'Nix OS as well as Windows.

In this case I will be using Fedora Core 1 and Windows XP on my lappy.

Boot to Linux and the disks and partitions appear in the /dev directory as letters and numbers. Here's a diagram..

The first trick is to find what Linux is calling those Windows partitions. To do this su as root and type the following command:

/sbin/fdisk -l

This should produce a list of the hda filenames which Linux has allocated to all the existing partitions, both its own and those belonging to Windows.

Windows partitions are mounted as folders in Linux and I like to keep everything tidy by creating corresponding directories in the parent /mnt directory. I want to map the D: drive. Create a corresponding directory:

mkdir /mnt/ddrive

..and then run the command to mount the partition to this directory..

mount -t vfat /dev/hda5 /mnt/ddrive

Note the -tvfat switch which tells Linux we're mounting a FAT (actually FAT32) file system. Once this is done we can change to the mounted directory and use our files..